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What are your thoughts on parents keeping their child's gender a secret?
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Depends on what kinds of behaviors you're talking about. In this thread, we're primarily concerned with behavioral differences between the sexes. We can look at hormonal changes within a given individual (such as puberty) altering behavior, but that's a problem of a slightly different scope.
One of the examples brought up here was aggression. It is true that men are more directly physically aggressive than women. When this is studied across age groups and different cultures, men "win" out every time.
That said, there are a few caveats. First off, the actual average difference in physical aggression between male and females can often be quite small. The gap narrows in cultures where there is no female gender role that discourages aggression. The gap is also smaller in cultures with stronger markers of female empowerment.
Second, this is only true of direct physical aggression. If you include in your definition of "aggression" indirect forms of aggression like destroying property or spreading rumors, then the gap narrows a lot and can even go away entirely. What don't disappear are self-reported feelings of anger or animosity. This does not mean there isn't a sex difference: there clearly is. However, it brings up the question: how much of it is testosterone stimulating direct physical aggression, and how much of it involves our culture channeling such instincts into socially-acceptable outlets.
Third, is is one of the strongest - if not the strongest - major sex differences in behavior. Despite what I said above about the gap narrowing in different cultures, it's still remarkably stable. Other sex differences aren't nearly as stable. There's a pretty famous set of studies done at the University of Connecticut that I've talked about before: you can exaggerate the sex differences on math performance just by talking to the participants about sex stereotypes ahead of time. To contrast, the sex difference goes away entirely if you talk to the participants about strong female political figures. At the moment, the existing research on sex differences in math performance strongly suggests that the differences are cultural, not innate.
Fourth, what a lot of studies on sex differences don't bother showing (but will sometimes show up on a meta-analysis) are situations where the differences between the sexes are detectable but relatively small in comparison to the differences between individuals or cultures. MikeMan gave me a study on mate poaching a while back by David Buss that was a good example. The study looked at countries across all continents (I want to say roughly 100 different countries, but my memory is vague) and found that, yes, men are more likely to make sexual/romantic advances at a woman already in a relationship than the other way around. However, the differences between countries were enormous. Countries with stereotypically looser sexual morals were far more likely to report higher numbers of mate poaching than countries with tighter sexual morals. Some of the larger, more diverse countries - like the US - had very high standard deviations.
Part of the problem here is that you can draw a statistically significant conclusion that there's a sex difference for a certain behavior, but without looking at the overall variance across the entire population, you cannot infer that about a given individual. That's what's called the ecological fallacy - just because boys tend to be slightly better at math (in the US) than girls doesn't mean you can take a single boy and a single girl and predict performance on a math test.
So when you say something like "testosterone increases aggression and boys have more of it," that is a true statement, but it comes with a whole lot of footnotes and asterisks.
But the original post brings up another point. Why do people always mention the weight of the baby? I mean, who cares? "Wow, I squeezed an eight pound thing out of me".
It strikes me as very similar to when you take a really big dump, you turn around and you're sort of impressed. The pride of production, you know.
But even the least cultured among us doesn't go around bragging about this huge shit that you took. And certainly, they don't send fancy little cards out boasting about it. "The Thomson family was recently blessed with a 12 inch log that almost came out of the bowl".
So why all the braggadocio surrounding the size of babies? I know full well that babies are different from poop but the egotism about the size of the baby is exactly the same thing as big poops.
Why not just say, "I had a healthy baby?" Do we need to know the weight? And some people even mention the length. It's clearly a weird thing very analogous to this pride over large faeces.
Yeah I meant to mention that students at Montessori schools who went to preschool perform significantly better than students at Montessori schools with no preschool experience. I think that's tremendously interesting because it reflects a constant across all approaches to education: whether your kid attends a religiously affiliated private school, a public school, a Montessori school or whatever, those kids who went to preschool outside of the home always perform better. I think the why behind that ought to be studied more because it's one persistent factor that flies in the face of homeschooling advocates' position that any form of homeschooling is better than all forms of structured schooling.
For most people this would have preempted the rest of the post
It's not totally unheard of in anthropology. Actually the Pihawa Indians revered the buffalo and called them "kom-keewa" which translates to "great scat" or "big poop." They believed that large poops were a sign of strength. The Pihawa would settle conflicts by literally having a pooping contest - they would actually make this paste from the leaves of the buckthorn plant that was a natural laxative, and whoever could make the biggest poop would win. It was a customary sign of respect among the men to compliment other men for making big poops.
Generally the people to whom the message is going either care or are assumed to care about the kid for one reason or another. There aren't many things to really say about a baby, description-wise. If they're healthy then there's that. Eye color. Size. That's about it unless your kid is born with hair, which I think is the minority. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care past the kid's name for anyone I know or am related to, but I'm sure you know someone who wants every tiny detail of their friends' and family members' business. "April and Bob went to lunch and-" "Where did they go? What did she wear? What did he wear? What time did they go? Did they go to that place on Main St? Oh, did she have the shellfish?"
So to be actually on topic: what's the point of not telling people your kid's gender?
I understand the whole "it should be a choice and we want to let our kid make his/her own choices about what they want to do, wear, and be like rather than just falling into gender stereotypes", but what does that have to do with telling people what gender your kid is? I mean, they're going to find out eventually, and presumably the kind of person who wants to raise genderless children probably doesn't hang out with the kind of people who would try to force their kid into blue or pink jammies or whatever.
That aside, it seems like it's just setting the kid up for disappointment down the line. We live in a gender segregated world. The kid can wear whatever the hell they want and do their hair however they want, but at some point (pretty early in life) they are going to run into situations where arbitrary distinctions are made according to gender, at which point all of their parents "You can be whatever you want!" is going to fall apart. They can't use whichever public restroom they want. They can't be girl/cub scouts if they've got the wrong bits. They can't join the opposite-gendered sports teams. At some point they're not going to be able to buy clothes that fit properly because male and female anatomy is not the same and, outside of a fairly narrow band of unisex styles, clothes aren't made to fit both body shapes.
And if the whole goal is "do what you want!" then what happens if the kid just wants to fit in? I mean, maybe they live in a new-age commune where all the kids are unschooled and nobody has a gender, but otherwise the neighborhood kids are all going to be going to school and taking part in extra-curricular activities and having genders. Kids are nothing if not an engine for forcing one another into the status quo.
I don't think the effect is very big most of the time. Homeschooling does not mean your kids can't be well-adjusted socially.
Well I think you're mistaken. The homeschoolers I've met have all been very odd as adults. I doubt it's a coincidence.
Scouting: has no place for the "Gender Explorer". Brownies and Cub scouts codify harmful gender roles
Church Activities: Church is just a tool of the patriarchy to keep womyn barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen
Sports Leagues: Segregate male and female genders very early on.
Kids in the neighborhood: can be very cruel.
I feel very bad for these poor children.
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
Humans are crazy.
I remember having a similar argument over a device I'll abstract out and say: it's not that device A has any innate effect on property B, it's that people with property B are more likely to choose device A over alternatives then go on to use device A to further propagate property B.
Yeah. Can you believe I just made that up on the spot?
Personally, I interpret that not to mean that homeschooling is awesome, but that our public schools are terrible.
Non homeschooled childen go through the public school system... no supervising there. The best you can do pretty much is try to impart your values the best you can and hope they hold onto them but everyone here whos been through the ringer (public school) will tell you that it usually goes out the window when they meet different people with different values (good ones or bad ones) and decide for themselves which values suit them best.
Public schools arent even close to perfect but I will put my children through them. My girlfriends brothers were almost completely homeschooled/ private schooled and they are seriously awkward kids. They arent my only example of this but they are my most prevalent.
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It certainly doesn't make it impossible, and not all homeschoolers are batshit crazy. If I ever wanted to have children I'd probably give serious thought to homeschooling because I'm fairly certain that I'm a better teacher than most elementary school teachers are. The batshit/not-batshit ratio is probably pretty high, though, I'll agree.
The problem with homeschool and socialization is that socialization becomes something you have to do rather than something that happens. When your kids go to school they have to go every day, 5+ days a week, and they interact with the same group of other kids every time they're there coincident to learning stuff. If they're homeschooled then you don't have a forced communal activity. You can try to make your kid join sports teams or become a scout or whatever, but where teachers are used to children having wildly varying levels of interest and commitment in school and are - in part - paid to make sure that kids get along and play nice, extra-curricular activity leaders are usually volounteering and don't want kids there who don't want to be there. Nobody wants a kid on their baseball team who hates baseball any more than he or she wants to be playing it. So even a homeschooled kid who has lots of active, social interests is going to miss out on roughly 40 hours of enforced socialization a week compared to a similar kid who goes to regular school.
I'd be interested in seeing some of it. It certainly doesn't line up with the extensive anecdotal experience I have.
I really think that you know the exceptions rather than the norm when it comes to homeschooled kids.
Me too, and not just because you admitted to making up some crazy bullshit up-page.
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
Just some stuff that was easy to find from Googling:
A summary from education.com (possibly biased, because they sell homeschooling materials, but they also provide resources to parents with children in public & private schools): http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Socialization/
BTW, you can get the full text of that study here.
Here's one looking at freshman at a Christian college: http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,5,9;journal,8,46;linkingpublicationresults,1:300319,1
That's just looking at Christian kids, which eliminates religion as a possible confound, but the results may not be generalizable to secular populations, but it's still consistent with the data mentioned in the article I linked above.
So the argument that large amounts of social exposure to peers isn't necessary for healthy social development (and may actually be detrimental) rings very true to me.
My anecdotal experience is also fairly negative towards homeschooling. Hell, the one homeschooler I met in the navy who actually impressed me the most still ended up suffering an ignoble fate once his sheltered ultra-christian upbringing collided with the brutal lord-of-the-flies reality of the submarine. The others I met weren't just extremely conservative, but also socially retarded.
Yeah, it is. If you check out the PDF, it was actually a published master's thesis.
Even the stuff I've seen behind paywalls like PsycINFO and ERIC are either small sample-size, or are published in journals like "Journal of Home Education" or stuff like that.
So yeah it's not the greatest evidence. I'm not overwhelmed by it. But I would think that if there was a relationship between homeschooling and poor social adjustment, it would have shown up somewhere by now.
It has shown up. In the anecdotal evidence of some extreme conservative Christian households.
Really? In the off chance I ever have a kid, my family is going to seriously try to force them to into such things -- never mind the unconsciously different ways people tend to treat infants and very young children of different sexes. So I and whatever partner I have the child with would likely need to become recluses if we wanted to keep them from doing so, which is the exact opposite of healthy for the kid. So just not telling them the baby's sex is easier if that's what you're going to do.
Also I can't comprehend how "they'll learn it eventually" is a real argument. You'll die eventually so does that make your life's efforts worthless, too? When you're hungry at lunch time do you think "well, I'll have dinner eventually so I may as well not eat right now"? Something being temporary doesn't invalidate it. It can be an argument for being unsustainable but I at least have only ever argued that hiding a child's physical sex from others (adults particularly) in infancy and the earliest points of childhood is about as far as you can rationally get. Go further and you're entering crazy town territory, I agree.
"The path of least resistance is best", then? Which is fine, a perfectly viable way to do things and completely logical. Raise your kids that way. That's your right as a parent and given I'm unlikely to have kids I don't really have a vested interest in the childrearing aspect of this argument aside from long-term self interest and a general fascination with the subject.
But kids grow up, and the way they're raised in the initial formative years prior to schooling has effects on them. Just because they may conform for a time doesn't mean they will forever and even if they do conform forever it doesn't invalidate a gender-neutral early childhood (no more than a nonconformist invalidates gender-biased childhoods). Hell, it might actually give them some legitimate, useful perspectives later in life that the average person won't have. Or it might not, depending on a whole set of circumstances only some of which can be predicted beforehand.
Funny, my anecdotal experience has every homeschooler I know who took their education seriously (which only discounts two out of my three siblings) with at LEAST a four-year degree.
Including myself.
Of the group of people I grew up with, who were homeschooled, one has a degree in theater, one has a degree in dance and english (and dances with a company in Seattle!), one has a degree in political science and a master's in english, one has two degrees- creative writing and a master's in english, another has a degree in early childhood education, another has a degree in environmental sciences, and I have a degree in biology and just got accepted into a PhD program for Entomology.
Anecdotal evidence is the worst kind of evidence for the current homeschool/school debate.
Also? Fun fact- about half of those people were "unschooled" for most of our learning period. Two of us ended up going to "real" high school after a certain point, but for most of us it was because we wanted to get away from the family, and incidentally we both did very well (top 10%).
I was unschooled.
I can't find any full peer-reviewed articles on ERIC, but there are several abstracts which read something like this:
(From a study by Dr. Mary Saunders which appeared in the ournal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice. v11 n1 p77-100 2009-2010).
There are a lot articles I can find the full text for, but they're not peer reviewed and are also obviously stupid. My favorite took the time to point out that nationally the median test scores on standardized tests taken by students educated in public schools are at only the 50th percentile. Duh.
Edit: Feral's seen that one, too! Only I can't access the page from her link, as I couldn't access it on ERIC.
That's honest at least. It's pretty weak to put your personal gender politics ahead of what is best for the kid (and lets be frank, there's not enough evidence to say the genderless child-rearing is particularly better or worse, but that's not the point. Children are not supposed to be social studies experiments, that's the point).
Yeah, I get the feeling that Arch's parents didn't home school him and his siblings to ensure that the satanic public school system didn't lead him away from the jesus.
It sounds like some of it may be (unintentional) selection bias. Of course the homeschoolers look roughly as good as the traditional schoolers in college - they both made it to college. I don't know how these kids are being evaluated, but there's most likely bias to be found in the grading as well. Mom wants her kid to succeed, Mrs. PS249 doesn't have any special incentive for her kids to get As instead of Bs. And when you flip it around the traditional schoolers wind up looking better if you use a testing method that the traditional schoolers are familiar with (say a ScanTron test with a strict time limit) while the homeschooler is used to taking his time and/or doing most stuff verbally or something similar.
And that's where a lot of it gums up for me. Every homeschool kid I've known has been coddled and overprotected. Oh, Billy isn't a good write so we won't write papers - we'll have conversations! Oh, Billy isn't good at spelling so we'll do math! And then when it comes time to report grades he got an A in everything because grading was a multi-pass process. Do the work, mark the problems that are wrong, rework those problems, get an A. I'm not saying that all homeschool situations work like that, but the chance for inaccurate information is there.
I don't think there's a number out there I'd trust on it. But a lot of the extremely religious also happen to go to church regularly, which is a source of socialization.
The Isenberg Report , in the Peabody Journal of Education lists "religion" as the second most prevalent cause, but finds that on average homsechoolers have a lower amount of people who identify as "religious" in comparison to traditional high schools.
Actually....
My family is very "weirdly" religious- my mother doesn't believe in evolution, and she thought that the normal school environment A. wasn't conducive to education and B. was full of sin.
Coupled with C. I had a lot of health problems and D. my family moved states once a year thanks to my dad's job, she decided to homeschool my siblings and I.
1. To completely shelter them from things you don't want them exposed to, whether it's bad language or the devil's corrupting influence or evolution or playground chatter about the nasy bits.
2. You think you're better able to educate your kids than any trained professional.
Both of those things seem likely to be incredibly stupid and wrong in most situations.
Yeah, but your parents were rich and white enough to pay for all those degrees. They could have shot you in the head and you would have still managed to pull off a BA in English.
They'd have horribly lopsided educations, great in math but not a clue about science for example. Or they'd have incredibly distorted historical knowledge.
Regardless of whether you're religious or not, conservative or liberal, "I don't think public schools are conducive to education" is one of the most commonly cited reasons for homeschooling. That's one of the factors that's consistent across the board.
The other consistent factor is that whether your family is religious or not, conservative or liberal, a child who is homeschooled is much more likely to have been raised in a two-parent household compared with the rest of the population.